
Continue reading “hues .3”
motherhood and childhood are complex, complicated and heart-expanding, heart-breaking and heart-full journeys — but mostly elusive destinations, in our rose-colored or cracked rearview mirrors /
today is an exceptional day for revisiting motherhood, childhood and mother-child relationships //
Mothers’ Day, for many mothers and children often feels unbearable from physical loss or heavy with physical absence; it may be pregnant with disappointment, misunderstandings, unrealistic or unmet expectations; reminiscent of failures, judgment and estrangement;— or worse, it may be painful with the memory or ongoing experience of neglect, abuse, betrayal or disownment ///
these golden beings that we, mothers, carry and birth from our bodies and raise up with our arms and hearts into a world that is too often, dark and heavy /
mothers were once golden beings too //
mothers can be|come dark and heavy worlds too ///
Continue reading “Mother’s Day: also a day for the children of mothers”
There’s a simple term for the look in Frida Kahlo’s eyes: self-possession.
The gaze is not that of the (putatively male, white) viewer looking inwards. It is her own. She’s the one who does the looking. Her preternaturally long neck holds her head completely still and completely erect so that the eyes are front and centre.
But it’s important to remember that Kahlo didn’t become iconic. She created herself, quite literally, as an icon. The process is one she controlled. Though it’s not a comparison I’ve encountered in art history, Kahlo seems to me to be, among other things, a precursor of Warhol. Her images seem to be made for mass reproduction.

fetal cells
remain in a mother’s body for decades
they know this
particularly
because of mothers of sons
son cells discovered
co-mingling in their mother’s
blood
and marrow
long after their first breaths of atmosphere
and for far too many mothers,
long after their child’s last
we mothers, in-secret chimeras
29, 50,
years after birthing /
no wonder
he breathes
1,191.582 miles away from me
as the crow flies,
as the monarch flies
as the hummingbird flies
and still, i feel the cells of gold i alchemized
for 42 strange, wondrous weeks
in my crone bones
postpartum is forever
Continue reading “postpartum”foremost Earthling, crone,
and mother to a golden boy;
nightly traveler into liminality;
mostly obeisant
to intuition & premonition;
poet, writer;
heart-sleeved,
bleeding heart pessimist;
devoted friend of crows (at last),
meadow-restorer/tender,
& long-lost sister to snakes, bats and coyotes,
deer & bluebird whisperer,
seed saver, food grower,
an admirer and propagator
of lilacs, hydrangeas,
sycamores, mulberries, pawpaws and oaks;
dna-tested kin to goldenrod, milkweed,
bison, cottonwoods, thistle and monarchs;
wader into ephemeral and glacial
lakes and deep snow;
Moon’s luminous, loyal daughter
& Sun’s prodigal, ever-questioning shadow
equally;
devout, ecstatic
desert, forest and river worshipper;
reverent of and humbly deferent to
bear, wolf, moose, elk & bighorn sheep and hummingbirds;
a mountain, canyon, valley,
prairie and beach walker;
i swam and swam and swam my way alive.
the holy trinity of feminine archetypes



motherhood: the unparalleled choice, work, joy and privilege of my life


Ageing is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose:
the fulfilment and confirmation of one’s character.
- James Hillman
“Life is a farce if a person does not serve truth.”
- Hilma af Klint
“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with."
— Jean Shinoda Bolen

"Women's most feared power over men is the power to say no. To refuse to take care of men. To refuse to service them sexually. To refuse to buy their products. To refuse to worship their God. To refuse to love them. Every therapist knows that sex can be forced, but no power in the world can force love from any woman who wishes to withhold it."
- Barbara Walker
“The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power.
Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.”
- Marion Woodman
The CruX: historically, continually, and invisibly stationed by, and on the crosses of, men
women, womxn, womqn, womyn and girls have been both the cross-bearers and the crucified – ever since the unnatural and unholy “conception” of the Roman Catholic Church and all its subsequent patriarchal, misogynist Christian derivatives.

”As a symbol, the Crone had to be suppressed by patriarchal religions because her power ‘overruled the will even of Heavenly Father Zeus.’ She controlled the cycles of life and death. She was the Mother of God, the Nurturer of God, and, as a Crone, the Slayer of God. While Christianity retained the feminine as Virgin and Mother, it eliminated her role as Crone.”
-Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames, The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
